Last Night They Loved You
by nicalyse
Summary: For all of the times she's been chosen first, she's never been chosen last. Quinn-centric. One-shot.


She's been chosen first before. She's been the favorite, the girl on top both literally and figuratively. She was a daddy's girl, earning more of his attention than her older sister (who, frankly, monopolized their mother's attention enough to make it all even out). She became head cheerleader, the quarterback's girlfriend, the object of desire of the most popular guy in school - all simultaneously. She had what she'd always wanted, what every girl wanted. She was Quinn Fabray.

And it took only the tiniest of breaths to knock her off the top of her house of cards.

(Or the human pyramid, as the case may be.)

For all of the times she's been chosen first, she's never been chosen last.

Her father wanted the fantasy girl that he built in his mind, the virginal, sweet little girl. She was a figment of his imagination, an amalgamation of his kind-hearted, innocent Lucy and Quinn, with all of her fabricated warmth and control. She loved the way that he looked at her, like he was nearly in awe of her each time she told him of a new accomplishment.

When she joined the choir at their new church in Lima, it was because she'd finally lost the last five pounds that kept her from her goal weight while recovering from her nose job; the painkillers made her nauseous enough that it was easy not to eat. Her daddy had kissed the top of her head and told her she had the voice of an angel before insisting that her mother take her to Neiman's for a new dress for her first Sunday with the choir. (He was always careful not to comment on the changes in her body, but Quinn knew that he was just giving her a chance to choose a dress that showed her new shape.)

When she made the Cheerios, she was given her first credit card and told simply to, "Use it responsibly, Quinnie." (She still has that credit card, and though she refused to use it at all during her pregnancy, she occasionally uses it now for unnecessary extravagances simply to see if it will still be paid. It's never been refused.)

When she started the Celibacy Club at McKinley (as president, of course), Daddy took her to a chastity ball in Lexington. It was an entire weekend away for the three of them, though her mother was really only there to help her dress and to sit in the back of the bar in their expensive hotel, drinking gin and tonics and reading Karen Kingsbury novels in between trips to boutiques in the nicer parts of the city. Quinn sat with her daddy in her pristine white dress, her hair swept away from her face and a brand-new gold cross resting at her throat, and she felt perfect.

She got her driver's permit the same week that she was made captain of the Cheerios, the first freshman Sue Sylvester had ever given that title. For that, Daddy gave her a brand new car, red and sporty, because, "No daughter of mine is going to learn to drive in an inferior vehicle." The red and white pom-pons that hung from the rearview mirror with a little crystal cross, however, told the truth.

He put her on a pedestal, and Heaven help her, she loved it. She had spent so long feeling like she wasn't good enough, _knowing_ that she wasn't good enough, that being seen as this beacon of perfection was deeply empowering. Intoxicating, even.

Her fatal mistake, the thing she didn't realize, was that by allowing herself to be lifted up to such a height, she was setting her up for a devastating fall from grace. She deluded herself into thinking that she could maintain that level of perfection indefinitely. She hadn't ever (still hasn't) been more wrong about anything in the world.

When she showed him that she was a real person who made mistakes, he didn't want her any more. He said he didn't recognize her. That made sense, even if it broke her heart, because she barely recognized herself any more.

She should have seen it coming, but she ignored all of the signs that it was going to come down around her ears with the practiced ease of a girl who had spent her entire life pretending that everything was perfect.

She and Finn started dating at the beginning of summer before their sophomore year, when he was tapped to be the starting quarterback. He managed to catch her alone at one of the countless house parties that defined that summer for her, grinned at her bashfully and asked if he could have her number. That was it, really. They'd known each other, vaguely, since she started at McKinley, but freshman year was all about cheerleading and establishing her place among the girls; she hadn't had time to devote to boys, not like she did now that she was safely (oh, God, she'd thought she was safe) on top.

In hindsight, she doesn't know how Finn managed to charm her with words, clumsy as he is with them, but he did, with phone calls and text messages and Facebook chats. She could tell, even then, that he was a sweet, well-meaning boy and that he was truly enamored of her. That was why it was so easy to agree to be his girlfriend. She didn't just want to be the girl on Finn Hudson's arm then; she truly did care about him. She loved him, as much as any girl can be in love with a boy when she's fifteen and concerned with appearing perfect at all times.

She met Puck when she met Finn. Back then, they were a package deal, not unlike Brittany and Santana.

She knew that he wanted her. She'd known that all through freshman year, because as much as Finn wasn't on her radar that first year, it was impossible not to know who Puck was if you walked the halls in a red fly-away skirt. He was absolutely shameless, vulgar and forward and incorrigible. He and Santana were always on and off. He was a man (boy) on a mission, and she thinks that the pursuit was always better than the conquest for him.

He treated her differently than he treated other girls. Everyone thought that it was simply because she was his best friend's girlfriend. She knows it was that perception that allowed them to get away with the things that they did.

She never did ask how he got her number; it would have been the easiest thing in the world to simply find it in someone's phone, Finn's or any one of the Cheerios', or just to ask Brittany, who wouldn't have thought anything of giving it to him. But he had it, and he was texting her, and there wasn't any reason not to respond to him as long as he wasn't being inappropriate.

Of course, she was being very lenient in her definition of _inappropriate_. She let him get away with a lot as long as he wasn't directly propositioning her.

He wanted to get to know her, and she let him.

She didn't open up about anything deeply important. She didn't tell him about the fact that her mother was a half-drunk doormat nor that her father was obsessed with the way that they looked when they were all out together in public. Nothing in the world could have made her tell him that she had once been fat and ugly, a girl that no one wanted to be friends with.

She didn't let him know Lucy. She told him about Quinn Fabray.

She told him that she secretly loved mob movies - _The Godfather_ and _GoodFellas_ and _Scarface_ - because her maternal grandfather had loved them. She told him that her favorite meal was pancakes and bacon, but that she almost never allowed herself to have either. (More to keep Lucy at bay than to maintain Coach Sylvester's diet, not that she would tell him that.) She told him that she really hated wearing her hair up because it gave her viscious headaches.

Finn was out of town on the day of Coach Sylvester's July weigh-in, visiting his grandmother with his mom, which meant that Quinn couldn't call him when Coach made a scathing comment about the size of her behind when she saw that Quinn had gained ten ounces since last month.

Ten ounces and a comment about her backside. That was how she began the day that she destroyed everything she'd worked to have in her life.

She called Puck after her parents left her home alone to go to some country club function, one of these things that was all booze and no food, like they wanted to be in Connecticut instead of Ohio, that would keep them out until all hours. She asked him if he was going to Kylie Greene's party that night, and when he said yes, she'd asked if he wanted to come spend some time with her instead.

She doesn't know why he agreed. She doesn't know why she left her Cheerio uniform on, why she'd had it on all day, instead of changing into something more comfortable (not speaking euphemistically).

Puck came to the door with a four-pack of wine coolers even though she'd never seen him drink one, and she knew that he'd never seen her drink anything. (Because up until then, she didn't drink, not at all.)

"Jesus," he said when she led him into her bedroom, and she turned to glare at him over her shoulder. "No," he said, rolling his eyes and gesturing to the wall above her bed. "Jesus."

She should have known better.

They sat together on her bed, leaned back against the headboard to watch _Scarface_. He kept his hands to himself, though she couldn't quite call him a gentleman, while she worked her way quickly through two of the drinks. They weren't delicious, but they didn't burn in her throat the way her father's scotch smelled like it would, and it wasn't like drinking a tree the way her mother's gin tasted. (She'd once taken a gulp from her mother's glass when she was twelve, desperately thirsty, not realizing that it was gin and tonic instead of just water. It was disconcerting to say the very least.)

She hadn't eaten anything all day, couldn't bring herself to after what Coach Sylvester had said, so the alcohol went straight to her head. It made her feel even less sure of herself, even more insecure.

(She wasn't drunk. That's the excuse she's always used, in an attempt to absolve herself of the guilt, but it isn't as if she didn't know what could happen when she invited him over.)

Before she knew it, she was on her back, his hand drifting up her thigh and his lips against her neck. He was telling her that she wasn't fat, and that this was more than a hook-up for him. However much she liked Finn, however good they were together, he'd never looked at her the way that Puck was looking at her now. Puck's eyes were more intoxicating than the alcohol she'd consumed.

She regretted it later, but right then, she wanted him. She hates herself for being ashamed to admit that.

She decided that she was going to forget about it, to pretend that it never happened. She prayed that night, asked for forgiveness and promised that she would never do anything so terrible again, then pushed it out of her mind, intent on never thinking of it again. From that moment, it would be as if it never happened.

The next time she saw Puck was at a party at Monica Farrell's house. He was sitting on the kitchen counter talking to Matt, and she and Finn walked in, his arm banded around her waist as they moved toward her boyfriend's best friend. She didn't say anything more than she had to, and she didn't make eye contact at all. Since no one knew about their friendship, no one thought it was strange that Celibacy Club president Quinn Fabray wasn't going out of her way to be nice to Puck the Womanizer.

By the end of the next week, he and Santana were back together (again), and Quinn was subjected to more than a couple of double dates before she informed Finn that she just wanted to spend time alone with her boyfriend.

Quinn grew up in a house where people ignored the things they didn't want to see. Things that were unpleasant and difficult weren't acknowledged. Those few things that couldn't be ignored were dealt with quietly, then promptly disposed of as quickly as possible. (For example, the utter lack of any photographs of Quinn before the age of thirteen anywhere in the house except for the boxes in the back of her mother's closet.) She'd had nearly sixteen years of practice in looking the other way, which was why it was so easy to do when she missed her period in August.

It was harder in September, but she managed just fine.

But then, the week after her missed period, one of the ladies at church reached out to pat her cheek, and the woman's perfume hit Quinn's stomach wrong, forcing her to swallow bile and excuse herself, moving as quickly out of the sanctuary as she could before she ran down the narrow little hallway to the bathroom. She heaved into the toilet bowl at the same moment that her knees hit the tile.

It's nonsensical that throwing up at church was what made her acknowledge the truth of her situation. She knew better than to believe that it was some form of divine intervention, God's way of telling her to open her eyes to the truth. It was simply a coincidence. She didn't bother taking a pregnancy test. She knew already, and unless she wanted to drive all the way to Kentucky to find a store where she could be sure that no one would recognize her and comment on her purchase, there wasn't any way to get a test without her parents hearing about it before she even had her change in hand.

She really didn't mean to tell Finn in the hallway at school, though she didn't know enough at the time to blame it on hormones. He was so sincere when he asked her what was wrong that it just came bursting out, tears spilling down her cheeks as she babbled and he stared at her with wide eyes.

(She figures the way that he told her parents for her more than makes up for the way she sprung it on him.)

Quinn knew that she had to have this baby. Fornicating before she was married, with a boy she wasn't in a relationship with, was bad enough without becoming a murderer on top of it.

Sometimes, she thinks that pregnancy really does make women stupid, because everything that she did during those first few months was so incredibly ludicrous, almost unforgivable. Lying to Finn, shaming Puck into lying to Finn with her, considering giving that baby to Terri Schuester...stupid, stupid girl.

Puck wasn't the sort of boy she wanted to be with. He had status, yes, but the wrong kind. Associating herself with him would have made people assume things about her, things that not only weren't true (until they were), but would negatively impact the image she'd worked so hard to cultivate. No, Finn was a better choice, the kind of boy she wanted at her side, the kind of boy who could support her through all of this. She thought that he would grow up and be the man that she knew he could be. (The man he did, in fact, become.)

Instead, she watched him slip away, lured by R_achel Berry_, of all the people in the world. Rachel Berry with her hideous clothes and her big, fat mouth, and all of the optimism and ambition and sympathy that spilled out of that big, fat mouth. Quinn hated her, hated her for everything that she was and wanted to be, hated her for being so sure of herself when she obviously wasn't what high school social conventions demanded that she be.

She envied her her confidence, her absolute certainty that she was who she wanted to be and that she would get to where she wanted to be. Quinn had only ever been sure that she was doing the right thing in the five minutes before she destroyed it all, and the fact that she let herself destroy it made her wonder if she'd been wrong all along.

In some ways, Quinn was grateful to Finn for being brave enough to tell her parents, just like she would be grateful to Rachel for breaking open the secret.

Everything Quinn learned about burying the truth, she learned from her mother. Judy Fabray, who looked at everything through rose-colored glasses and a haze of gin, pretending that she didn't know that her daughter was carrying a little person in her belly, pretending that she didn't notice the morning sickness and the indisputable rounding of Quinn's abdomen. Judy Fabray, who stared with wide eyes as Finn sang the world's stupidest song and then denied that she'd ever realized what was going on.

Judy Fabray, who let her husband tell her daughter to get out, who just sat idly by while Quinn begged her, begged her father, to just _be there_ for her, begged them to love her unconditionally the way parents are supposed to do.

Judy Fabray, who just poured another gin and tonic and sat in the living room with her legs primly crossed while Quinn looked through her tears to pack the bag that Finn would set in the backseat of her car before prying the keys gently from her fingers, all while her father stood in the kitchen watching the time on the microwave timer slip away.

(Judy Fabray, who apparently did find some backbone through all of this, leaving the husband that she knew had been cheating for years when she realized that he'd been wrong to throw out their daughter, the only person who even pretended to care about what the woman said or thought.)

When Rachel told Finn the truth, Quinn loved and loathed the girl in equal measure. She meant what she said, that Rachel just did what she wasn't brave enough to do, and she hated her for how easy it was, and how seriously she insisted that it would all be okay.

She hated that Rachel Berry was stronger than she was. Quinn had always been so sure that she was strong, and Rachel revealed her every weakness.

She told Puck that she wanted to do it alone, that she couldn't handle the stress. But then she went back to the Hudsons' house and to get her bag and realized that she didn't have anywhere to go. Even knowing that, she politely declined Carole's offer to let her stay until she had somewhere else to go. She saw the betrayal and the utter _relief_ that filled the woman's eyes, and she couldn't stand their gaze. Quinn considered going to Brittany's or Santana's, but that would have meant explaining the entire situation to their parents, something she didn't think that she could handle.

She sat in her car in the McKinley parking lot until nearly nine that night, staring, unseeing, off in the distance and trying to decide what she was going to do.

Puck answered the door at his house when she rang the bell and blinked at her when he saw her standing on the front porch.

"I don't have anywhere else to go," she admitted quietly.

His mother had stared at the two of them, her eyes lingering over Quinn's distended abdomen when he ushered her into the living room, his head bowed while she tried to concentrate on keeping her tears at bay.

"Oh, Noah," Mrs. Puckerman had sighed, sounding weary and disappointed. She didn't ask any questions. It was fairly obvious what was going on, even if she didn't have all of the particulars.

They didn't have a spare bedroom, so Puck led her to his room before disappearing back downstairs to talk to his mother, a conversation that Quinn was glad that she couldn't hear. She didn't know what to do in there, among all of his things. They'd barely been friends, and they certainly weren't friends now, despite the effort that he had put into trying to convince her to be with him. He was just the boy she made an awful mistake with.

She was standing at the foot of his bed, staring at the Ohio State University poster hanging above his bed when he came in, closing the door behind him.

"My mom is super pissed."

She just blinked at him. Of course his mother was angry, but he still had a home, didn't he? She was unsympathetic.

"Are you okay?" he asked after a minute, likely because she was just standing there, staring through him. (She wasn't seeing him at all. She wasn't seeing anything.)

"No."

It was the most honest word to come out of her mouth in weeks.

He didn't try to touch her that night, even when she crawled into bed beside him in her yellow nightgown. He just waited for her to get settled, then flicked off the lamp on his bedside table. Moonlight seeped in around the edges of his curtains.

"I'll get a lamp for that table tomorrow," he said into the darkness a moment later, startling her.

"Thanks, Puck."

She was grateful that he didn't try to touch her, didn't attempt to pull her close and soothe her. She isn't sure if the gratitude was because she didn't want him to touch her, or because she felt so starved for affection that she would have liked it too much, would have come to rely on it.

The holidays were excruciating.

Being a devout Christian for whom Christmas had always been an extravagent, festive celebration, living with Jews was worse than culture shock. Puck tried. He bought a tiny, table-top tree and a packaged set of decorations (in shades of blue and silver, because he apparently couldn't resist himself) that he helped her decorate and set on his desk. When Mrs. Puckerman asked one night over dinner what Quinn's family usually did for the holiday, Quinn told her about the candlelight service at church and how it had always been her favorite part, even more than the gifts. That night, when he got into his bed beside her, Puck offered to go with her if she wanted to attend the service. "We can sit in the back so you don't have to see your parents or whatever," he added, watching her smooth his bedspread down over her thighs.

"No, thank you," she answered simply. She hadn't been to church since the morning that Finn decided to sing that ridiculous song at the dinner table.

She started going to temple with the Puckermans instead. (Quinn asked Brittany to go to her house and get some of the nicer dresses she'd left behind when she knew her father would be out, so at least she had something appropriate to wear. She never asked Brittany what her mother had said when the blonde showed up at the door and asked to raid her daughter's closet.) She got just as many looks there as she would have at her own church, but it was different, less judgmental, somehow. Even though she could see eyes lingering on the cross around her neck and the swell of her abdomen, she didn't feel the scrutiny of being Quinn _Fabray_.

She woke up freezing a few days before Christmas. She'd given up on her nightgowns, not liking the way that they stretched across her stomach, and had ventured to the mall for pajama pants with drawstring waists and tee shirts in a size she hadn't worn since she was eleven years old. Even with the extra quilt that Puck had thrown over her side of the bed when she'd mentioned how chilled her feet got when she slept, she was so cold she was shivering.

"Why is it so cold?" she whispered after she'd woken him.

"Dunno," he mumbled, his face turned towards hers but his eyes closed. "Furnace goes out sometimes."

He didn't seem at all bothered by the temperature, but Quinn couldn't shake the chill. She was trembling even after she'd curled herself into a little ball.

"Fuck, Q," he'd muttered after a few minutes, turning his head slowly and blinking at her.

"It's cold," she said unnecessarily.

"C'mere," he said, lifting the arm closest to her. He huffed out a breath when she didn't move. "'m'not gonna try to put it in you, I just want you to quit shaking."

She glared, but he was still half-asleep and didn't notice. That was probably why he said it in the first place; she could tell that he had been making an effort to watch what he said in front of her. (She didn't appreciate it as much as she should have.)

He was so warm when she moved against his side that she had to bite back the tiny moan that threatened to escape. It felt like wrapping her hands around a mug of hot chocolate after having a snowball fight without mittens, except the warmth went through her whole body, relaxing muscles she didn't even realize were tense.

It wasn't as awkward as she'd expected. In fact, it made her consider an option that she'd never seriously entertained before.

"I think we should try being in a relationship," she said the night before the first day they went back to school.

Puck looked away from the TV, where he had Yoshi eating apples and giant yellow caterpillars, to Quinn sitting on the bed. "What?"

She watched Yoshi run of the edge of the screen just before Mario died. "It's what everyone expects, us together." He blinked at her. "Isn't that what you said you wanted? To be with me?"

"Well, yeah," he said, "but the thing with Sant-"

"Don't bring it up," she interrupted sharply. She softened at the expression on his face. "It's a new year, a new semester. We can have a fresh start."

"You sure?"

She nodded, her lips curving upwards. "I'm sure."

Appearances are important, and she'd thought it better to be the pregnant girl with the wrong boyfriend than the pregnant girl with no boyfriend.

Quinn had sixteen years of pretending that everything was perfect. Pretending to be in a sincere relationship with Puck wasn't even a challenge. In his own way, he did care for her. Sitting with him at lunch, walking with him in the hallways, holding his hand in glee - it was simple. He insisted that he could respect her physical boundaries, and even though she could tell that he was frustrated with her when she stilled his hands before they could move over her stomach or - heaven forbid - her breasts, he never pushed.

He's an amazing kisser. His lips are impossibly soft, and he's gentler than one expects. His hands are amazing. He has a habit of letting his fingers linger at her shoulder, tracing the line of her collarbone and grazing in the hollow above it, curving around the place where her neck meets her shoulder, moving up to slip into her hair.

The quiet, simple kisses that they shared were the easiest part of their relationship. They didn't have the same interests, and the list of topics that they didn't talk about seemed to go on for days. (Fathers were at the top of that list, for they both had one who didn't want them, even if the men went about showing it in different ways.) There was so much tension between them, so many things that they weren't saying. But then one of them would move towards the other, and it was a brush of their lips, and then...ease.

They were kissing the first time the baby kicked, lying together on Puck's bed. She had finished her homework, and he was ignoring his. His hand was buried in her hair, tipping her head back a little so he could suck gently at her bottom lip at the same time as his thumb brushed the skin behind her ear in the way that always made her heart beat a little more quickly.

And then the baby kicked, making Quinn pull away with a strangled sound.

"You okay?" he'd asked, watching her carefully.

She'd nodded slowly, eyes wide, lashes fluttering when the baby kicked again. "She's moving," she managed.

That was the day that Quinn's body stopped feeling like her own.

That was the last time that she let Puck kiss her while she was pregnant.

Less than two weeks later, he was singing Sammy Davis Jr. to Mercedes and Santana was trying to lay her claim to him. The absurdity of it - these two girls fighting, in song, no less, over a boy who had a pregnant girl living in his house, sleeping in his bed - was amusing enough to temporarily distract her from the fact that, without Puck on her arm, she was invisible.

"You aren't like, pretending not to be pissed when you're actually pissed, right?" Quinn rolled her eyes. "You can't tell me it's okay and be pissed about it later," he said seriously.

"I don't care," she told him evenly, not even looking up from the diagram she was filling in for biology. "I'm not going to punish you for being a manipulative, womanizing social-climber."

He glared. "Gee, thanks, Q," he snarked before stalking out of the room.

The glist was a stupid idea. She'd read somewhere that sometimes, pregnant women actually experienced a drop in IQ, and whether or not that was true, the hormones were certainly interfering with her rationality. It backfired, anyhow. Puck spent time with yet another girl (Rachel, this time) for that terrible video, and no one even seemed to notice that Quinn's name was on the list at all. Nothing changed, and she was nearly expelled. She had never appreciated Mr. Schuester more than she did that day - never apprecitated him that much again - for keeping her secret and reminding her that, when this was all said and done, she would be Quinn Fabray again.

(Even if she still wasn't sure that she could get Quinn back; she'd been her for such a short time before it all fell apart. But then, she knew she could never go back to being Lucy, so what choice did she have but to find Quinn?)

She let Puck hold her hand in his truck on the way home that afternoon, but then pushed him away when he tried to kiss her. She didn't think even that could distract her from how terrible she felt, fading into the background. It was like being Lucy all over again, and the urge to draw attention to herself was shifting, doing a complete one-eighty and becoming the urge to hide away from everyone.

"Have you thought about keeping her any more?"

He asked it one night in the dark, when she'd thought he was asleep but he'd obviously known she was awake. She couldn't sleep at all, her body heavy and achy. If it hadn't been such work to do it, she would have been tossing and turning.

"No," she answered quietly. Her back was to him, but she didn't make any effort to move.

"Not even a little?"

She let out a quiet breath. "I thought about what would happen if we kept her. Never leaving Lima, never going to college. Getting stuck working some retail job, never having enough to give her what she needs. You and me hating each other," she finished in a whisper so soft she wasn't sure he could hear her.

He sighed. "Yeah." And then, a few minutes later. "Have you ever thought about what you'd name her?"

She pretended to be asleep.

(Later, when he brought up Jackie Daniels, she thought he was just doing it to get a rise out of her, like maybe he knew that she had been feigning sleep that night. Even Puck isn't so stupid as to believe that she would name her child after _whiskey_.)

He helped her with her Lady Gaga costume, and while she'd been prepared to launch a guilt trip to get him to do it, he'd agreed easily, twisting and winding the plastic around her body in an effort to imitate the photo that was glowing on the screen of her laptop. The next morning, Abby sat on the lid of the closed toilet to watch Quinn attach crystals to her hair and glue on pink feather eyelashes.

"That's so weird," Puck said from the doorway, startling her. She was glad he'd waited until she'd finished attaching the lashes; if he hadn't, she probably would have glued it into her eyebrow, or worse.

The dress was unwieldy, and Puck helped her put it on, gathering the fabric in his hands and lowering it over her head when she raised her arms. Standing there in her bra and pajama pants was as close to naked as he'd seen her since the night they made that terrible mistake. She didn't bother glaring when she realized that his eyes had been lingering on her stomach, just turned her back and pushed her pajama pants down to the floor.

She had never been closer to loving him than when he sang that song. She couldn't deny that he had a lovely singing voice, and after seeing him serenade both Rachel and Mercedes, her heart fluttered a little at hearing him sing to her. Puck is an excellent liar, but she could feel his sincerity. It brought tears to her eyes, and it made it easy to agree to let him be there when she had the baby.

Later, she realized that he wasn't singing for her at all, but for their baby. She wishes it wasn't so, but that realization tainted her memory of that moment. Puck didn't love her. Maybe he never did. It was naive of her to believe anything that he said, to trust that there was some part of him that cared for her. She was a conquest, the trophy that he knocked off the pedestal and shattered into a thousand pieces in his quest to possess it.

She knows that he didn't understand what changed, why she stop letting him even hold her hand, why she snapped at him no matter what he said, but she didn't care. She hated him for being so damn concerned all the tim. She was just so _furious_, always, and so deeply sad, that it didn't matter what Puck thought or felt. He couldn't possibly understand what she was going through, and she didn't bother trying to explain it, instead alienating herself from him even more than she already had been.

Moving in with Mercedes' family was the easiest thing she'd done in months. Of course, she didn't tell Puck that she was going until she was loading her things into her car with Mercedes' help, and she left it up to him to explain things to his mother. It was cowardly, yes, but she just _couldn't_, couldn't handle the stress and the guilt and the dramatics that would certainly go along with that explanation.

She thinks her cowardice is why she had the baby early, that it was some twisted form of karma, going into labor when she did, having the baby at such an inopportune time. (As if there was ever going to be a _good_ time to give birth when she was sixteen.)

The fact that her mother was standing in front of her when her water broke was just the icing on the proverbial cake.

Physically, it was the most painful, most difficult thing she'd ever done. Having a nose job, running herself to exhaustion, eating only carrot sticks and coffee for three days - none of those things came close to giving birth. Emotionally, she shut down so that it couldn't hurt.

For Quinn, the moment they took the baby to the nursery, she stopped being hers. She had been preparing herself for it for months, and she is an expert at pretending that things don't hurt.

She came a month early. Quinn was still weeding through the information she'd gotten from the adoption agency, reading about families who were eager to adopt the bastard child of two teenagers who had made a stupid mistake. But then Shelby Corcoran was knocking softly on the door of Quinn's room, telling them that she would love to take their daughter, that she was leaving Carmel because she wanted to start a family and she thought that their daughter was beautiful and perfect.

Puck looked at Quinn from where he was sitting in the corner of the room after Shelby left and Judy had gone for a cup of coffee. "What do you think?" he asked quietly.

"She doesn't have a husband." _She wouldn't have a father._

"Yeah." He sighed after a minute. "She really wants her."

Quinn blinked at him. "Yeah."

(What good is having a daddy if he isn't there when you need him?)

Shelby insisted that they both take the time to hold the baby and say goodbye. "I always regretted not doing that," she murmured quietly, her eyes on Quinn's for just a moment before she looked back at the baby in Puck's arms.

Giving birth meant that she didn't have to go to school for the last six weeks of the year, doing homebound work with Miss Pillsbury instead. Being at home with her mother again had uncomfortable moments, but it was the lesser of two evils. At home, she could go into her bedroom and be away from everyone, while at school she had to deal with the looks: curious, judgmental, concerned, indifferent. She went back to perform for Mr. Schue because Mercedes asked her to, pretended that she couldn't see Puck watching her when she slipped out of the auditorium.

"You have to come to glee rehearsal tomorrow," Puck insisted when she called him to find out what his 911 text was all about.

"Glee is over," she'd said flatly.

He made an exasperated noise into the phone. "No, it isn't. I'm helping Schue with this thing because it isn't over."

"What are you talking about?"

"Quinn, just show up."

(She's still glad that she was there.)

She spent her summer devising a plan to get back everything that she'd lost in the last year. She knew that she could get her body back and that she could manipulate her spot on the Cheerios out of Sue. The other things - the status, the reputation - were going to be harder, but she knew that she could do it.

She was Quinn Fabray.

She put so much time and effort into pretending that nothing happened, that everything was just the same as it had always been, that she almost started to believe it herself. Then she would make the mistake of slipping out of her robe before she walked by the mirror in the bathroom on her way to take a shower, and she would catch sight of the faint white marks on her lower abdomen, the indelible reminder of her mistake on her skin.

The doorbell rang one afternoon in the beginning of August. It was raining and her mother was at work, foreign a concept as it had been for Judy back then. Quinn was startled to see Puck on her porch, the raindrops that had hit his shoulders between his truck and the front steps leaving dark spots on his gray tee shirt.

"What are you doing here?" she'd asked, exhausted already.

"Are you seriously going to pretend that nothing ever happened?"

She took a deep breath, set her shoulders, and nodded. "Yes."

He scoffed, shaking his head. "You are so fucked up, Quinn."

She nodded again. "I know," she said, then pressed her lips together.

"You expect me to just play along with your bullshit then?" She said nothing, staring at him until he made an incredulous noise. "You know what? Fine, Quinn. Just fucking fine."

He'd turned then, walked briskly down the steps and to his truck. She stood there in the open doorway, frozen, and watched him back out of the driveway before roaring down the street.

It never mattered that she knew she was doing it; she couldn't stop hurting the people around her. She thinks that she probably hurt him most of all, made him feel used and worthless and like the failure that she knows now he was never going to be. She played his emotions, however unwittingly sometimes, and altered his relationships with nearly everyone that he knew.

He was the person that she'd come closest to loving in her life, and he was the one that she tore apart without mercy. He was just one in a long line of people who put her first, and she took him for granted just like all of the rest of them.

But he was different. At the end of the day, after everything she did, he still wanted her.


End file.
